On Sept. 17, just before 3:30 p.m., the small waiting room of Dr. Nour’s three-room pediatrics clinic in southern Beirut was packed. A mother was waiting to get preschool checkups for her three children. Two elderly patients were booked in for cataract treatments at the ophthalmologist office next door. Sitting next to them was a young couple whom Nour, whose name has been changed for security reasons, had not met before. The father bounced a 10-day-old baby on his lap. Clipped to his belt was a Gold Apollo Rugged Pager.
Nour brought the young couple into her examination room. She pulled out a blank file for the newborn and wrote his name: Aiman. She placed him on the scales: a little over 7 pounds. She lay Aiman on his back on an examination table and began to record his weight. As she did so, the man’s pager beeped twice.
“Excuse me,” he said, and reached down to silence it.
As he did so, about an ounce of explosives concealed within the pager detonated, sending shards of metal and fragments of its thick plastic casing out in all directions. The shrapnel tore deep wounds in the man’s abdomen, lodged in the ceiling of the clinic and lacerated the face of the baby as he lay on his back. Nour was thrown backward as the room filled with dust. She could not see through the smoke, but she could hear the woman’s voice shouting: “Aiman!”
I’m still utterly disgusted that the western media present this as anything other than state-backed terrorism.
Western media and a bunch of people here on Lemmy. “You don’t get it these were extremely targeted”
Oh? So the deaths and injuries of children and other civilians was purposeful?
I mean… yeah, I do believe their bombing of Gaza is also extremely targeted.
It’s just a question of who you target.
And even if it hadn’t been as indiscriminate as it was, imagine the terror everyone around them must have (and likely continue to) experienced after seeing the person standing next to them in the grocery store suddenly have their goddamn legs blown off.
This is exactly how you create millions of more “terrorists,” and Israel knows exactly what they are doing. Just another generation who (understandably) wants to enact revenge with whatever means they may have, so Israel can give a plausible excuse to obliterate them with Western munitions.
Rinse and repeat.
I can understand why the people who performed the attack consider it to be “extremely targeted”. All accounts that I have read say that these pagers were used directly by Hezbollah as an alternative to cell phones, which they believe the IDF have the ability to track. I haven’t seen any reputable source claiming that these pagers were in use by the general population. So they consider these attacks targeted at Hezbollah, because only Hezbollah members should have had them.
They were not intending to target children or other civilians, but of course when something goes off at a random time like this there is no guarantee that only the targets are in possession of these devices.
However, I think the attack will end up actually harming Israeli security, for two reasons:
First of all, they put too much explosive stuff in it. If it were a smaller explosion (or even just a short circuit leading to device failure), fewer people would have been hurt, and they would have more claim to say they were targeting communications infrastructure. But if the explosions were smaller, the attack would not have gotten into the news. I think they made the explosions larger than necessary just to make headlines, without regard to collateral damage. I think that’s the part that would get any other country into hot water as a war crime.
But more importantly, they have proven to Hezbollah that Israel cannot track these closed pager networks, otherwise they would not have needed to blow them up! So now Hezbollah has learned to open up every pager before deploying, and once they source more devices they have their secure network back.
So in a few months, Israelis will be in a less secure position than they were before the attack, just because some of their leaders wanted to make headlines.
Pagers are a civilian object though.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule12
There was no way to know where these people would be when the bombs went off. Israel could have detonated at night, to minimise the chance of civilian casualties. They didn’t. During busy markets.
This was literally textbook terrorism, and against international law (see link).
You know that Hezbollah is a part of their government right? They have seats in their parliament. So even if they just attacked “Hezbollah” they attacked politicians, politicians in their homes with their families. If anyone directly targeted U.S. governors or congresspeople, or godforbid knesset members, all of the same people would be screaming murder and terrorism from the tops of hills. This is blatant racism.
How do you feel putting a small explosive into the pocket of a Hezbollah operative compares to firing a rocket into a children’s playground?
Fuck off apologist equivocator. Pointing out the horrors that Israel perpetrates does not condone the horrors another group perpetrates.
Its was targeted strike on members of the terrorist group Hezbollah, its quite literally anti-terrorism.
Literal terrorism. State-sponsored terrorism.
It really bothers me that we’re (the West) letting Israel get away with so much. First Palestine, then these random terrorist tactics, now Lebanon. And the. People wonder why there’s entire generations and groups of people that hate them.
There’s only one of two end games here that I see. 1) complete genocide of populations or 2) a massive war when people are pushed too far.
I can only think they believe 1 is truly viable so keep pushing where they can.
Do you think it’s a bad thing the West is letting Hezbollah get away with attacking civilians in Israel? Or is it a good thing?
Fun fact! You can decry senseless violence from one source while not excusing it from another! Criticism of Israel’s tactics should never be taken as endorsement of terrorism perpetrated by Hezbollah (or Hamas, etc.), just as criticism of the tactics of Hezbollah (or Hamas, etc.) should never be taken as endorsement of terrorism perpetrated by Israel!
So do you decry senseless violence from Hamas and Hezbollah or are all you complaints one sided.
The whole place is a shit show. Has been for years, centuries, millennia.
A funnier fact! The poster I replied to wasn’t ‘criticizing Israel’s tactics’ - they were questioning why ‘the West’ allowed Israel to attack Hezbollah.
Take your ‘both sides are bad in this conflict’ to heart and read their comment again
Isreal wants a war in the middle east to force America’s hand. Their main goal is to sway more evangelical Christians to vote for Trump who will wipe every adversarial Muslim country off the map. I’m not saying Biden does not have a hand in the ongoing conflict and genicide in the area. Right now the democrats are the party enabling these atrocities right now. I’ll never complain about those that make this fact a sticking point on how they are going to vote. Outside of the globe environmental catastrophe that will doom all humans, I don’t see a bigger issue to get behind than stopping an ongoing genicide. I’m voting for the democrats but I’m also protesting against the democratic party that is helping genicide. I’m marching with my fellow Palestinian brothers and sisters. Don’t just shout down those with legitimate hangups about voting for Harris/the democrats. Try to understand why they feel that way and push your representatives to publicly support Palestinian rights and now Lebanese rights. Even if the dems win if they don’t change course on this issue, we’ll all pay one way or another.
I’m curious to see if Gold Apollo will be offered any remuneration for lost brand confidence over this. Their name has been everywhere and they had almost nothing to do with it.
